Arsenal, meanwhile, is 8th. There’s certainly no relegation danger afoot – but you might not know so by listening to some of the sky-is-falling sentiment reverberating around the stately and modern Emirates today. For the storied likes of Arsenal, 8th may as well be 20th.

The trophy drought – that’s a word we see with increasing frequency around Arsenal and embattled manager Arsene Wenger – reaches back to 2005. The volume of rancor grows annually.

And woven into those previous two sentences is the question to be pondered here. Because Wenger isn’t really “embattled” so much as he is “perennially embattled” these days. And that volume, at some point, simply cannot grow any louder.

It’s difficult to know where to begin with Arsenal, a team so perpetually in crisis that there will surely come a point where the crisis is no longer a crisis, but merely the norm. There’s a philosophical poser for you, all right: a crisis can only last so long before everyone’s used to the mediocrity and they’re not angry, they’re just tired. Although they probably will be quite angry if they contrive to lose to Reading, a team so useless that they managed to Arsenal up a four-goal lead against Arsenal the other week …

That was a reference to an absurd 7-5 verdict back in October, when Arsenal beat back a four-goal deficit to prevail in a Capital One Cup contest.